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Ranting off our chests

We’ve noticed that DLH from bombjack grabs our scans and removes the back page. We’ve of course sent him a mail about removing our modified publications from his site, but he has ignored us so far. I used to have respect for him and his work, but alas that is of course gone now. So, should we continue on the path with common goals, or should we just not add more stuff?

Other options could also be to only release low quality publications from our own scans, make high quality a paid service, watermark the pages.

Now why the rant you may say, well though we do borrow and get contributions, most of the stuff is also paid of, from money from our own pockets. And while BJ gets quite a nice amount of money in contributions, he basically gets paid for our publications as well. We aren’t as known and large as his site, so people will of course go to the place with most contents.

Drop a comment, but please keep a nice tone.

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About Carsten Jensen

Carsten is a Commodore enthusiast with the goal of preserving as much Commodore information as possible, whether it being hardcopy or digital.
Besides scanning for this site, he also dumps tapes and disks for preservation and contributes to the TOSEC database.

9 thoughts on “Ranting off our chests”

This isn’t very nice behaviour obviously, but no matter what, I think that the main purpose here is to preserve and make all the old books and magazines available before it disappears completely. While putting your own stamp on all your scans is a good idea, I don’t like the idea of watermarking or only making low resolutions available as this kind of goes against my idea of preserving of the originals.

I would say the best thing here is to make people aware that he is taking your scans and publishing them as his own and then continue to show that you always strive to provide high-quality materials. If he had taken your scans and made them available on his site unaltered with your credit page, then I would think that would be fine as that would serve as a backup in case your site should disappear or go lost for some reason.

If he had taken your scans and made them available on his site unaltered with your credit page, then I would think that would be fine as that would serve as a backup in case your site should disappear or go lost for some reason.

That wouldn’t have been a problem either. The banner page acts like the intro of the old cracks.

I have not taken your scans and claimed them as my own. Numerous time I have credited you and your website, even linking to it. I get lots of scans submitted and do not always know where they came from. Those get posted as anonymous or unknown. And yes I do remove the page you add, I find it tacky. On the properties page is your information also, that I did not remove.

I get a few donations and they usually barely cover hosting costs for two (2) servers. I have spent thousands buying books, magazines, etc.. for this effort. Definitely not doing this to make money.

No matter who donated the scans came from, You’ve still removed the backside and knew exactly where they originated from. I don’t care how tacky you find them, then just don’t add them to your own site/grab them as your own. The least you could have done was ask, or even reply the mail I sent.

@David
I also don’t understand why you’re removing the backsites. Please just let the file untouched and everything would be fine, I guess. It would be no difference for your site … and if your not able to do it … please just don’t upload the manuals to your site.

@Carsten
I love your manual scans (the best amiga scans around) and I really hope you continue your great work (without adding watermarks, passwords or releasing the manuals in lower quality)

David Haynes has also taken/used scans from my website without any acknowledgement of where he got them from. I know as I actually offered him scans at one point but when asked if I could reciprocate and use some of his in return he flat out refused so pretty much a take, take attitude from this particular person.

In all fairness he isn’t the only one to do such a thing. Jason Scott at Archive.org has literally ripped all the content from my website and made it available there, again, without any acknowledgement of where he acquired it from.

I am afraid that unless you are happy simply with the fact that you helped preserve the content then you may as well pull the plug on it as even if you made it a paid site (which opens you up to commercial litigation for making money off other peoples IP), someone will likely pay for a file and STILL upload it somewhere else where everyone else will get it for free. It’s the nature of the internet I am afraid. No honour amongst thieves…….

Why doesn’t that surprise me, it’s ok for him to use other peoples work, but let others use his is a no go?
There are no excuses that he doesn’t know where they come from.
And he still haven’t removed my pdf files from his site as I requested.
I guess it’s time to watermark all future publications.

Setting a watermark using the built-in feature of Acrobat Pro is essentially useless as even if you password protect the file there are plenty of PDF password removers on the market and all they have to do is bypass protection & disable watermarking, annotations etc and they have a pristine copy once again.

That leaves embedding a watermark image on the page using an editing program but once you go down that path you essentially ruin the ‘preservation’ aspect by corrupting the page.

I’ve pondered these issues myself but decided it wasn’t worth the time worrying about asshats like DLH and Jason Scott as they aren’t the only ones ripping other sites content off (Emuparadise, RetroCDN, Atarimania to name a few) but I guess that’s a decision only you can make.

I even pondered whether to learn to make a magazine app for the Apple iPad that uses encryption to even open a file but then people can just screengrab the pages anyway so decided even that is pointless!!!